Puppet Passage of the Day...

[paeng]

"The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe

http://worldebooklibrary.com/eBooks/...queror-676.htm

[Bleak&Icy]

Here is a puppet passage that made this bleak and icy pessimist laugh out loud:

Even George Bernard Shaw loved puppet carnage, although he was generally a pacifist and his own dramas were sophisticated satires for live actors. His lifelong attraction to constructed performers began in childhood, from watching them getting bashed: "Nothing delighted me more," he once wrote, "than when all the puppets went up in a balloon and presently dropped from the skies with an appalling crash on the floor."

-- Puppetry and Puppets: An Illustrated World Survey by Eileen Blumenthal

Puppet carnage=the human condition.

[yellowish haze]

" Would she be awake yet? Before she could move to find out, something stirred inside her. It felt as though her innards were fossilized by the second, beginning to fracture like ancient, parched stone. A dry trickle began at her core. Her spine became an involuntary arc, cracking like splintered wood. Mouth agape, still as a discarded puppet, she waited for whatever it was to crawl from her."

-- Supple Bodies by Conrad Williams (from his collection Use Once, Then Destroy)

[yellowish haze]

"The puppets hold mirrors in their little wooden hands. The mirrors are mnemonic weapons to startle us into ourselves. We look in the mirrors. We see our own reflections. Our eyes brighten. A smile crosses our lips. We are suddenly within our own bodies again, breathing crystal air."

-- Puppets Holding Mirrors by Thomas Wiloch (from Mr. Templeton's Toyshop)

[yellowish haze]

"A boy who won't be good
Might just as well be made of wood."

— Walt Disney's Pinocchio

[yellowish haze]

"Today, in his least happy period many people come to regard [the marionette] as rather a superior doll—and to think he has developed from the doll. This is incorrect. He is a descendant of the stone images of the old temples—he is today a rather degenerate form of a god.... The marionette appears to me to be the last echo of some noble and beautiful art of a past civilization. But as with all art which has passed into fat or vulgar hands, the puppet has become a reproach. All puppets are now but low comedians."

-- Edward Gordon Craig, The Actor and the Über-Marionette ( The Mask, April 1908)

[yellowish haze]

I promise this will be the last one for today.

"The eyes of a puppet can open and close, turn left and right, or squint, and these movements may be done singly or in conjunction with moving the eyebrows up and down or opening and closing the mouth. In one or two heads the bridge of the nose can be sunk into the face, while in another type the upper lip can be raised to bare the teeth. Heads which represent married women have no eyebrows. In former times it was the custom of wives to shave them off as a symbol of loyalty to their husbands, and this custom is perpetuated on the puppet stage."

-- A. C. Scott; C. E. Tuttle, 1963., The Puppet Theatre of Japan

(a yank of the puppet strings back at you, Matthew;))

[G. S. Carnivals]

"He notices that everyone else on the street is a marionette dangling from wires. The wiggle-waggle of their arms and legs, the incessant bobbing of their heads, and the clatter of their wooden feet on the sidewalk are most annoying. He wishes the marionettes would go away, but the wires lead from their bodies into the sky, disappearing into the clouds, and he can see no hands operating those wires. There is nowhere to lodge a complaint."

Thomas Wiloch - "Marionettes"

[G. S. Carnivals]

"He contentedly ate some marzipan while putting various puppets through their paces, looking into some of the picture-books, and then reviewing his smartly uniformed army, which he deemed invincible for the good reason that none of the soldiers had a stomach."

E. T. A. Hoffmann - "Master Flea"

[Bleak&Icy]

His face was bathed in ecstasy. The pupils were luminous, large and threatening. He had the look of a madman or a prophet.

After a while Ethel remarked: “But you have grown into one of the master-figures of the age. Why not be content with that? Is there no limit to your ambition?”

Reginald smiled: “Ambition! Shakespeare stopped when he had reached his full growth, when he had exhausted the capacity of his contemporaries. I am not yet ready to lay down my pen and rest.”

“And will you always continue in this criminal course, a murderer of other lives?”

He looked her calmly in the face. “I do not know.”

“Are you the slave of your unknown god?”

“We are all slaves, wire-pulled marionettes: You, Ernest, I. There is no freedom on the face of the earth nor above. The tiger that tears a lamb is not free, I am not free, you are not free. All that happens must happen; no word that is said is said in, vain, in vain is raised no hand.”

-- "The House of the Vampire" by George Sylvester Viereck